Chasing Coco

I happened to be in Toronto earlier this year for work and much to my very pleasant surprise Toronto has a large number of nice fabric shops! Apparently this is due to a booming film industry in the city. One of my coworkers had to practically drag me out of King Textiles , which was good as I had already had a pretty big fabric binge. King Textiles had a fantastic selection of wool, linen and above all, silk! I bought three different silks, two because I thought they might work for my jacket and one because it was on sale for 9.99 CAD/yard (even less USD!)! For silk dupioni! and it was an amazing color, though I did not have my wool with me, I did not anticipate it match my jacket's main fabric but low and behold, it's a fabulous combination - better than the other two choices I had bought in fact. No worries there, I will happily use them for other projects. Can you tell that I am absolutely in love with my lining? I'm actually having a bit of a silk love affair right...

After the multi-week project of fitting my muslin, I was ready to cut my fabric. My crazy expensive fabric that I can't get any more of unless I make a 10-hour drive to New York. Just a little intimidating. Part of what makes a nice jacket is matching the pattern of the fabric at the seams, this is also a big pain in the rear. If you're like me, after you were sewing for a while you really started to notice how little commercial clothing bothers to match patterns especially at the side seams and it started to annoy you. Since this is my first jacket to have this complicated of a design, when I was shopping for my fabric I tried to consider the pattern and how difficult it would be to match. A lot of boucle is plaid so there is both a vertical and a horizontal pattern to consider. I choose a fabric that was more of a tweedy look so the pattern is less obvious because there aren't stripes, so if I don't have an exact match it will be less noticeable. To begin, I str...